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| Rembrandt, "Road to Emmaus" |
Many are the motivations for people to worship. But far down
the list of many churchgoing Christians is Jesus’ resurrection. It would strike
many as phony to give that as a reason for worship, as opposed, say, to being
able to pray, getting some practical guidance from a sermon, being in a
supportive community of like-minded people. Don’t get me wrong. I am not
suggesting that if you are such a churchgoing person you don’t believe that
Jesus was raised from the dead. I don’t for a moment imagine you have missed
the connection between his triumph over death and what the Church has taught
you about how that somehow is the lynchpin of what the whole Christian
enterprise is about. Furthermore, you might even be convinced that the entire
purpose of the Church is to get you ready to go to heaven when you die, a fate
that awaits you precisely because Jesus actually died to make that possible.
But there is indeed a problem with Christian worship—and it
is far deeper than sermons that don’t speak to us, or music we might not
particularly like. The problem is that the Church through the ages has by and
large failed to understand the real thrust of resurrection. This is exactly why
this 24th chapter of St. Luke’s gospel can really be helpful in our
understanding what worship and therefore Christian life is really about.
Take a close look at the story. It begins with two disciples
walking along on a Sunday afternoon—the day we call Easter—who are clueless
about the resurrection of Jesus. They were part of the company of disciples who
had heard from some women earlier that morning who had been to the tomb and,
not finding the body, had seen a vision of angels declaring that he was alive. Luke
has already told us that those who heard the women’s testimony did not believe
a word of it, which to them was just an idle tale. Up comes a stranger our of
nowhere who joins them on the road. These
two do not recognize him. He begins what is known as a midrash within this story which itself is a midrash—an
interpretation, largely symbolic—of biblical texts and the events they cite. That
sets the stage for the two men to invite him to stay and have a bite to eat. There
is a gap in the story at that point. We aren’t told how this stranger who is a
guest suddenly got to be in the position of host, whose place it was to take
bread, bless and break it. But it is in that very action that their eyes are
opened and they recognize the stranger to be Jesus himself. Immediately Jesus
vanishes. Then it all falls into place: the midrash about Messiah, the effect
that his exposition of scripture had on them, the way the mysterious appearance
of Jesus tracks with the women’s story of what the angels had told them. They
rush back to Jerusalem to report what had happened. They find the other disciples,
discover that by this time Jesus had appeared to Simon, and as the disciples
are talking about all this, Jesus himself comes and stands among them.
That is enough of the story to get at least the major points
Luke is making. One is that the resurrection body of Jesus is not to be confused with his spirit in a
non-physical appearance: he is not a ghost. Second, the resurrection body is
not a resuscitated corpse, because he is able to appear and vanish at will,
regardless of space, time, and circumstances. Third, there is continuity
between Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified and the risen Jesus, inasmuch as
the resurrection body bears the scars of his passion and death, which fact the
disciples see in the passage immediately following the Emmaus story. Fourth, a
transformation has taken place, because, though the body belongs to Jesus, it
has changed to the point that he is not readily recognizable.
Now we will never know until we get to the great seminar in
the skies exactly what happened to Jesus between his death on Friday and sunup
on Sunday. But one thing is for certain. Something happened to the physical
body of Jesus. And thus any resurrection we want to talk about has to do with the physical body, our physical bodies. And
we know well enough what is going to happen to them, don’t we? They are going
to die; and one way or the other they are going to return to the nothingness
out of which they came: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But the
church has been letting itself off the hook of talking about the physical body
for too long by transmuting resurrection into immortality. The issue of what
happens after death might be of great importance, but the more important thing
is what the resurrection means for this life, here and now. Even the most
devoted believer in an afterlife, of whatever kind, will tell you that what
happens there is directly tied to what we do here. From that I conclude that it
is wise to make a short list of things not to worry about and put afterlife
first on that list. Concentrate on living life joyfully, lovingly, gratefully,
kindly, and the afterlife, whatever shape it takes, will take care of itself. You
have my word on that.
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| Michael Triegel, "Resurrection of Christ" |
What we miss by appropriating resurrection as simply about
life in another dimension called heaven or some similar name is that nothing of
such a life is dependent upon the body.
Think about it: there is no earthly reason why a resurrection of a body is
necessary for a living presence to be experienced from the other side of death.
Examples are far too numerous of apparitions, ghosts, spirits, and other
nonmaterial beings. Very likely a number of people who are reading this could
give a detailed account of having experienced one or more such things.
So what does the resurrection have to do with your body? And what does all this have
to do with worship? Well, first, remember your baptism. What do we remember
when we forget everything else about baptism? It is “down under and back up
again.” It is a ritual death and resurrection. (We are in the land of metaphor
and symbol here.)
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| Orthodox Baptism |
When we are, as it were, pulled up out of the water we are
united with the Risen Lord in the resurrection. Yes, it has a future, that
resurrection life, beyond our mortal death. But it certainly does not wait for
death in order to begin. So whatever we do with our life in Christ we do in the
very body that is reading these words right now.
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| Edward Knippers, "The Resurrection of Christ" |
Second, what baptism symbolizes with water, bread and wine
symbolize in food. The same reality, namely New Life, is expressed in both the
sacraments. And because they are sacraments, baptism and eucharist are means by
which we receive God—called “Holy Spirit” in Holy Baptism and called “The Body
and Blood of Christ” in Holy Eucharist. The second most obvious thing about
sacraments is that they are physical means of receiving God. The most obvious
thing of all is that you can’t receive a sacrament without being a body.
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| Font, pulpit, and altar of St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC |
What do we make of Jesus’ identifying himself with Bread,
which he is reported to have done more than once? Why would he have chosen wine
to identify with? I suggest that these things that were in first century
Judaism never used the way Jesus used them in his Last Supper (bread as human
body, wine as human blood) are the key to unlocking God’s own identification
with the human body. And not just the human body, but the human body as one instance of all creation. We are
so used to thinking, even arguing, that God is totally distinct from the
natural world that it is challenging for us to see that “God” literally makes
no sense apart from something to be God of. If God is pure Being, or pure
Spirit, or pure Energy, or pure Consciousness, then that
Being-Spirit-Energy-Consciousness must have a receptor in order to be
meaningful at all. So, in a real sense, what we proclaim about the Bread and
Wine in today’s eucharist, namely that they are the means by which we receive
the real presence of Christ-God, is true of everything in the entire cosmos,
including you. The Incarnation neither started nor stopped with Jesus. God has
been expressing God’s self from the Big Bang onwards in that enormous Body
called the cosmos, the universe. And that means that there is no place where
God is not, nothing in all creation that does not tingle with the atoms and
quarks that come straight from the heart of Being itself, nothing animate or
inanimate that is too mean to be the home of the Holy.
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| Priest reading The Holy Gospel Father Sam Desordi-Leite, Sr. Priest, St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington |
And that is what makes good worship. Worship is acting out
what we believe. And good worship does that well. Bring your entire self into
the act of worship, leaving nothing out. Bring art, bring music, bring dance
and celebrate life. Bring your arthritic knees, the pain in your neck, or the
cancer you’re being treated for. Bring your muscular body and your tattoos. Bring your overweight body or your anorexia. Bring your babies to be baptized and your
corpses to be buried. Bring your aspirations and your shame, your
vulnerabilities and your pride, your sexual experiences and your attempts to
repress them. Bring your laughter and your tears. As the Ash Wednesday collect
reminds us, God hates nothing that God has made. And in the words that
Anglicans have been saying for hundreds of years, “Here we offer and present
unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy,
and living sacrifice unto thee.” When we do that, the Bread of Life is
mysteriously broken open and broken up, and our eyes from time to time
recognize the One who is living within us, who only vanishes from our sight to
reappear again and again, always more gloriously present with us
than we’ve ever imagined.
Based on a sermon on Christian worship preached on
February 10, 2019, at St. Luke’s Church Episcopal, Bethesda, Maryland.
©Frank Gasque Dunn, 2019
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